Chapter 7
Saturday 03 January 2032
Richard followed Elijah through the almost deserted open-air shopping precinct. City planners had moved away from the large covered out-of-town malls that were all the rage just a decade or so earlier and returned shopping to the centre of towns and cities. To be honest, Richard preferred this reappearance of the shopping experience of the 60s and 70s. Of course, he hadn’t been around to see it at the time but he’d seen videos and his parents, now in their eighties, had told him about their own experiences.
The shops had closed hours ago and the only people around – apart from the two men – were a middle-aged couple on their way home from celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, a group of three adolescents, and a homeless person organizing his ca
